By now,
it is an old saw that had the World Wide Web been designed by librarians
instead of physicists, there would be an index and some quality control
over what appeared in the collections. Using the miracle of metadata, the
Gateway to Educational Materials [GEM—see:http://www.thegateway.org/]
is reverse-engineering these capabilities into the Web, at least as far
as educational materials are concerned. The GEM Project Coordinator, Nancy
Morgan, leads the project team to think in terms of what educators need:
easy, fast, and free access to lesson plans, curriculum units, and other
educational materials on the Internet. This meeting of the minds (of users
and content providers) represents an important evolutionary step in enhancing
the effectiveness of the Internet for education.

From Page Views to Page ValueThe explosion of educational
materials and resources available for educators on the Internet has opened
up an exciting era of instructional exploration. However, as Jamie McKenzie,
editor of the Web-based "zine" From Now On—The Educational Technology Journal
and guest columnist for the Classroom Connect newsletter, reminds us, the
concurrent commercialization of the Internet has buried the "infogems"
in "infoglut" and made it harder than ever to sort between the two. This
inevitable conflict arises from the way search engines operate: The engines
look not only at the content of the pages, but also at information about
the information itself—called metadata—that is contained in the
beginning of each Web page and that is invisible to the user.

Many commercial sites use
these metadata tags the way pick-up lines are used in a singles bar, except
instead of wanting to get your phone number, the tags just want to get
your browser to visit their site. The developers/marketers of these sites
get paid by the number of eyeballs that have seen them, however briefly.

By contrast, developers
of educational materials want to connect you with useful content. They
want a more intimate relationship with you and your classroom. They want
to make connections that are appropriate for the subjects you teach, the
age of your students, your budget, your purposes, and a host of other considerations
that don't enter in to most other e-commerce transactions taking place
on the commercial Internet.

GEM's PromiseGEM promises to address
the educational explorer's search and retrieval concerns by providing one-stop
access to educational resources on the Internet. In fact, GEM is a consortium
effort sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. There is no fee to
join the GEM Consortium, and the Gateway to Educational Materials service
is also free. (See the box, "About GEM.")

The GEM Project already
has an outstanding reputation, both nationally and internationally, for
excellence in metadata and research, in professional collaboration and
training, and in the dissemination of public materials supporting educators.
Many GEM Consortium members are involved in consultancy work around the
world and have connections with overseas universities and international
industries.

Most important, the Gateway
provides a bridge between the consumer and producer worlds that is crucial
to schools that have embraced a knowledge-building paradigm. Projects developed
in the course of study should be worthy of and helpful to further study.
GEM provides a way for educators who are helping students create high-quality
projects to add these resources to the Gateway, using a tool called GEMCat.
(See "From Consumer to Producer: Creating GEM Records
with the GEMCat Tool," on page 20.)

About GEM
The Gateway to Educational
Materials (GEM) is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and is
a special project of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology.
GEM is part of the Information Institute of Syracuse, which is affiliated
with Syracuse University's School of Information Studies.

"The Gateway," "The Gateway
to Educational Materials," "the Gateway," and "GEM" are service marks of
the U.S. Department of Education and Syracuse University.

GEM vs. Search Engines
You're a fifth-grade teacher,
searching for an integrated science lesson on recycling. You try a first
attempt on Google [http://www.google.com/]:

Simple search with search string
+lesson +grade +5 +recycling

Hits: 5,898

If you spend 10 minutes on
each, that's 983 hours. If you found 10-20 quality resources, that's an
additional 10-20 hours, or nearly 1,000 hours!!!

What Difference Do GEM Capabilities
Make in Real Life?As one small example, Nancy
Barkhouse—a teacher and major collaborator with me on this article—has
a class of 32 students in grade 4, many with a history of low motivation.
She started by asking herself how to actively engage this group and decided
to maximize her class's 10-year-old computers. She's using a WebQuest designed
collaboratively with teachers in the U.S. and Australia while studying
online for her Master of Online Education from the University of Southern
Queensland in Australia. After students complete the WebQuest [http://hrsbstaff.ednet.ns.ca/nbarkhou/farm/index.html],
they'll integrate fine arts by having students choreograph movements appropriate
for the animals they research. The activity will be based on curriculum
outcomes and meaningful assignments, and students will work in collaborative
groups using technology and fine arts. Student reports may be done as multimedia
presentations or in traditional formats. It is tremendously important,
according to Barkhouse, that both the students and the teacher have ready
access to quality materials as they build these presentations. If multimedia
is chosen, then surely resources found on the Gateway will be incorporated.

Stepping back to look more
broadly at the GEM service, consider the benefits it brings to educators
in general:

GEM and Content DevelopersWe hope all educational
developers will embrace GEM, so teachers can rely on one source rather
than needing to try several. Here is some evidence of the benefits we think
will accrue to content developers:

When Barkhouse first posted
a classroom site in 1995, both she and her students had instant contact
from teachers and students around the world. Early search engines produced
lots of matches, but current search engines don't find their newer work.
Of course, they don't have time or money to register effectively with multiple
search engines. They want to share content easily, but teaching full time,
developing content, and maintaining links is time-consuming enough without
needing to register with several search engines. But if a Web page developer
spends 2 minutes with the GEMCat tool, the page content should be easily
accessible by all teachers via TheGateway.org. Further, if all developers
use the GEM system, it leads to one-stop searching rather than having to
search several databases. A common standard makes searching more efficient
and reliable for teachers and students. Technology-reluctant teachers are
more likely to use a resource when they are consistently successful with
it. And it will be easier to duplicate a search. If a bookmark is lost,
the computer crashes, bell rings, etc., one can retrace steps easily and
relocate the desired site.

A Content Provider's ViewWhen I spoke with Wendy
Petti, Webmaster of Math Cats (http://www.mathcats.com),
she shared the following comments about her experience in cataloging her
resources at GEM:

The GEM cataloging system
is really effective; when the GEM staff and the creators of educational
materials collaborate to describe and catalog useful educational materials,
it is a win-win situation for everyone. The Gateway is a valuable resource
to me as a Webmaster and as an educator. It combines the best features
of search engines, directories, and online reviews, but it often seems
to do a better job than any of those Web resources in helping users to
locate exactly what they are looking for.

As an example, my Math Cats
site includes an interactive pattern blocks activity. But you have to dig
pretty far down to discover it. And yet if you do a search for "pattern
blocks" at the Gateway, my activity is one of the first resources to be
listed. In contrast, Yahooligans—a Web directory geared for kids—wrote
a one-sentence description of my entire site and placed it in "math games."
There is not a clue that more than half of my site is devoted to explorations
of geometry, even though I have requested an entry in their geometry listings.
Google (my favorite search engine) has indexed every page of my site, but
I need to compete with every other page of every other site in its listings;
when you run a search for "pattern blocks," my page is listed 20th among
400,000.

As another example, one
of my favorite activities at Math Cats is the "Polygon Playground." When
you run a search for "polygons" at GEM, Polygon Playground is listed first
among 55 resources. And yet Polygon Playground does not appear within the
first 150 listings for "polygons" at Google, and it does not appear at
all among the few listings at Yahooligans.

When using a traditional
search engine, it is not easy to tell which sites are appropriate for certain
grade levels (which is one of the search criteria at GEM). One clearinghouse
that wrote a review of Math Cats did not attempt to list all of the activities
on the site, and there is no way to locate specific ones. At the Gateway,
I as a Webmaster have discretion over which of my materials are cataloged
and how they are described. Of the many search engines, directories, and
Web sites of educational listings I have contacted over the past year,
GEM is the only one that offered me a chance to collaborate to catalog
and describe my resources. The process was efficient and effective.

Where GEM Is and Where It's HeadedTo sum up, here are what
we at GEM see as the main strengths of The Gateway to Educational Materials:

Metadata allows precision searching.

It's designed for educators—a
collection of educational resources.

It makes finding educational
resources on the Internet efficient and effective rather than overwhelming
and time-consuming.

There is currently available
a User Groups GEM Consortium membership, composed of organizations that
use and promote GEM. Some current members include the American Association
of School Librarians, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics,
and the National Education Association.

In addition, there is also
a Collection Holders GEM Consortium membership, composed of organizations
that have collections of educational materials that are, or will be, cataloged
and entered into The Gateway. Some current collection holder members include
EDSITEment, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the Franklin
County (Virginia) Public Schools, and Federal Resources for Educational
Excellence (FREE).

In the future, we plan to
provide even more on-target, efficient searching and browsing, including
academic standards and resource type. We invite you, even urge you, to
join us.

The Magic of Metadata

GEM metadata “makes it happen.”
Similar to a card catalog, the structured information called metadata describes,
manages, and organizes library resources. Used in a GEM record, metadata
describes, manages, and organizes Internet education resources.

It provides on-target, efficient
searching and browsing by grade, subject, or keyword: